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Staking your Cardano (ADA) tokens with a pool puts your cryptocurrency to work earning a reward in your wallet that the wallet holder can withdraw any time.  You are fully in control of your tokens and the pool operator has no access to your funds by design of the Cardano blockchain network.  The pool you stake with provides the infrastructure to generate rewards for people staking with them.  By definition people staking with a pool are called delegates.  In order to sustain the Cardano network pool operators run staking pools which are responsible for minting blocks and providing rewards to delegates and pool operators.  The blocks on all crypto currency networks are ledgers of transactions performed on the network.  All nodes on the Cardano network have a complete database of all the blocks and synchronize with each other over the Internet.  Pool operators are responsible for maintaining those nodes to ensure decentralization and resiliency of the network.  Cardano staking does not require the delegator to lock up their tokens by design compared to other blockchains such as Solana and Avalanche.

Decentralization is based on holding a scarce resource.  There are 3200 pools registered on the Cardano network, 4 largest block produces have shares of 8%, 4%, 3% and 2% of the entire supply of Cardano tokens.  Delegates are participants in a cryptocurrency network, in the case of Bitcoin miners which burn massive amounts of electricity to sustain the network and provide hash rates to pools.  In the Bitcoin network several largest pools such as Foundry USA provide about 32% of the blocks, Antpool 21% and 3 other pools 18%, 8% and 6%.  If two dominant pools would join together the Bitcoin network could be compromised with a 51% attack and in the worst case scenario everybody’s funds would disappear.  On the Cardano network the are 1.3 million stakers or delegates and the blocks produced are run by a fairly inexpensive computer or virtual machine making energy use negligible compared to the Bitcoin network.  In summary Cardano is orders of maginitude more decentralized and energy efficient than Bitcoin.  Read more about it here:  Is Cardano A Security?

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